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Council told to drop skills offer

The FE Commissioner has recommended that Lancashire Adult Learning (LAL) should offload its skills programmes after he was sent in to inspect over a grade four Ofsted result.

The report by Dr David Collins (pictured) on LAL, which has around 7,000 students including 5,300 community learners, was published on Monday (March 9.

It recommended that the provider should “restrict its activities to adult and community learning”, while consideration needed to be given to “more appropriate ways of delivering the skills pro-grammes currently being offered through LAL by using colleges and providers with greater experi-ence and success in the delivery of this provision.”

There were around 550 employability learners, 300 apprentices and 80 students on traineeships being trained by LAL as of December.

And Dr Collin also called for changes to governance arrangements to “provide suitable monitoring and challenge of the executive”.

A spokesperson for Lancashire County Council, which has a current adult skills allocation of £2.2m, said: “We are working closely with the Skills Funding Agency, colleges, training providers and em-ployers to ensure there is no reduction in the skills investment in Lancashire and students enrolled on courses are able to continue with their studies.”